Oct '21 Newsletter - Children With Speech and Language Needs

Welcome to our second newsletter! We're excited to have you here 🤩

In this October version we discussed evidence-based class literacy instruction for children with speech and language needs, telehealth, developmental delays, waiting times to access treatment and dyslexic-friendly books for adults.

Let's build the future of speech and language therapy together! 🙌

Oct '21 Research Paper 🧐
"Evidence-Based Class Literacy Instruction for Children With Speech and Language Difficulties"
published by Gail Gillon, Brigid McNeill, Amanda Denston, Amy Scott, and Angus Macfarlane
(full text available online here)

We were impressed by the following findings
- "Children with speech and language needs showed a strong intervention response in phoneme awareness and vocabulary learning". More specifically, a paired t test showed children with lower oral language and speech disorder made significant growth (p < .05) in their speech accuracy, improving from 82.2% (SD = 11.3) to 90.6% (SD = 6.7) at the end of the year!
- However, the study showed that children with speech and language needs "needed more support to transfer skills to word decoding and spelling"
- Last, but not least, early intervention is key as always: "Implementing the approach earlier in the school year resulted in stronger literacy performance at the year-end for all three groups"

The authors note that "this parallel trajectory of literacy growth for children with and without speech and language difficulty is concerning as it indicates children with such difficulties are not catching up to their peers, which could result in longer term educational inequities."
This leads us to wonder how speech and language therapists could help address these potential long term inequities?

We would love to hear from you! Feel free to share your experience about working with children with speech and language needs by joining the discussion on our community forum.

Other news we've been reading 🤩

We're fascinated by "The Efficacy of Telehealth-Delivered Speech and Language Intervention for Primary School-Age Children" paper demonstrating that both telehealth and in-person sessions enable speech and language therapy patients to make significant and similar progress 🙌

In Singapore, the number of young children diagnosed with developmental delays increased by +25% in the last five years. Speech and language delay and disorders represents 60% of developmental issues diagnosed 🧐

In Carlow, a child has to wait 4 years before accessing speech and language therapy. Delays in treatment can create long lasting impact on children's confidence and ability to communicate with others. How could we decrease waiting times? 🤯

An inspiring initiative in Somerset: Alistair Sims, who runs the Books on the Hill store, has published a series of eight dyslexic-friendly books for adults. Did you know that there are 6.3 million dyslexic people in the UK? ✨

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